Discussion of Finance and Wall Street, and Dreaming of Pitchforks.

Monthly Archives: August 2011

As Wall Street firms toss bonuses to their employees, so does the NFL in similar fashion award enormous signing bonuses and contracts to big talent players. Just the other day, the NFL announced they’d be giving Michael Vick a $100 million contract to stay on as Eagles QB.

A day before this was announced, there came a different sort of event: The AFL-CIO had just welcomed the NFL Players’ Association (NFLPA) into its loving embrace. The NFL players’ union has joined the AFL-CIO. Why now, one might well ask.

In what way do the interests of a group of seasonal workers — many of whom are multimillionaires — dovetail with the interests of the regular workers who make up the rest of the union? It’s a reasonable question.
We do understand that the players union includes not only the millionaire brats and the quarterback divas, it also includes those earning far, far less; and it is a large group of people for whom permanent disability is a significant risk.

But today the NFL just announced it has agreed to pay Michael Vick $100 million. Why does he need union representation — and why is he in one at all, when his employment situation is so many light years away from that of the rank-and-file worker?

Consider what it means. The largest union in America has just annexed a whole bunch of rich people. Those rich people, the star players, make their big money from labor negotiations. Some rich people actually will have to care about how labor gets treated!

Furthermore, Rachel Maddow made clear on her show a week or so ago how Labor and the Democratic Party rise together — when they rise, that is. Historically, the growth of Democratic power was because Labor supported it wholeheartedly; and Labor did well when the Democratic Party was able to carry out its platforms.

So now there’s some important movement occurring. Does this have something to do with superPACs? Are the football players going to help save labor? If so, this may be a really good deal for us. The position of the middle class working person is precarious in every way, and he needs the help of somebody strong. Not necessarily physically strong, but why not?

The strength of NFL players could be symbolic. Think about it.

If some big NFL players were to show up to support another workers’ group demonstration or strike, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have the cameras see on our side. Picture it: Tired, striking health care workers (for example), standing in the rain with their picket signs, shuffling back and forth in front of the hospital entrance, … and suddenly a column of enormous athletes in jerseys marches up and they arrange themselves behind the strikers, and stand there with their enormous arms folded across their chests… just like in Revenge of the Nerds, when the older (and athletic, and black) Tri-Lambs show up to support their scrawny nerd brothers! What a day that would be!

When the 2012 presidential campaign begins in earnest, will our big strong brothers (Brothers in Labor!) be around to show support for the working man, giving a much-needed boost to the party trying to fight the Big Banks, the Wall Street firms, the Phil Gramms, the Koch brothers, and all the super-rich who hate ordinary people?

Wall Street banks and the SEC officials pretending to regulate them may as well have had the colostomy bags ripped off them, shoved in their faces and told, “explain this!” — airport style. That’s the thought

The SEC, it seems, has been destroying the documents of a case anytime the matter or complaint does not become a full investigation. Called out on it, now they are trying to deny and cover up that they’ve been doing it.

Taibbi’s revelations are amazing since much of them relate to whistleblower Darcy Flynn, who still cannot speak to the press. Flynn is an SEC attorney who was appointed to oversee documents which, he discovered, are regularly destroyed at the SEC as soon as the case relating to them isn’t upgraded to a full investigation. The destruction of such preliminary documents happens to be illegal, but it had become standard procedure. Senator Charles Grassley is currently trying to get answers about it from them.

Preliminary investigations over the last few years, include such familiars as: Goldman Sachs, Bernie Madoff, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Deutsche Bank. Most of whom received government bailout funds.

And just why did those in particular not get investigated, when as we know, criminal activity was definitely taking place then, and resulted in the “cratering” (Taibbi’s favorite verb) of the economy just a little later? That of course can be answered with a picture of a revolving door, with SEC top people leaving and going straight to their new, very-well-paying jobs at JPMorgan or another bank, while the just-resigned head of said bank goes to his new job at the SEC. A few years later they or other individuals at same banks trade places. The relationship between the SEC and the Big Banks is that of friends, mentors, and future employers.

It’s not just the evils of who in particular got elected last. It’s a deeply-rooted weed in our government which has been growing for almost 2 decades, the era of the too-big-to-fail Big Banks.

Here in Pittsburgh, suddenly there are multiple bridge and road rebuilding projects going on at the same time, so driving from one end of town to another requires at least one major detour. I now realize the assigning of money to do the work must have been done before Governor Tom Corbett took office. I think, given his druthers, he would wait and wait, until he’d gotten some jails privatized or something before loosening up cash for repairs. He detests spending as much as he seems to detest prison inmates; at least, apparently, those in Dauphin County Prison, and wouldn’t mind if they suffered some more in order for the state to get money.

I had expected to be falling into one river or another, soon, from a collapsing bridge. We have so many.

But former Governor Ed Rendell, who tonight was on the Rachel Maddow Show, made my poor heart leap because he is indicating the road we can take to fix the entire economy: He suggested that we start immediately to fix the roads and bridges and stuff — sort of like Roosevelt did after the Depression. Jobs programs. In fact, he obviously set in motion some helpful money here before leaving office, because work is going on right now.

I can drive around town and see some beautiful examples of Works Program buildings from FDR’s legacy: for example, the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. It’s used for classes, for university offices, meetings, events, cultural activities, you name it. Things were built that were useful and lasting.

Such a route is precisely what people like Paul Krugman have been saying urgently was the answer. That yeah, we actually do have to spend our way out of the hole we’re in. When a powerhouse like Rendell says now that this is what we have to do — now that the artificial crisis of the debt ceiling is over, now that the presidential candidates are lining up like beauty contestants and being found very ugly — it carries possibility. It carries an air of reason. I guess timing is everything.

Some days on Wall Street, either you catch the fish or the harafish catches you.

Harafish is Egyptian and means the urban poor. It may be a slang term.

Bad things happen to vacant houses, when mortgage processors have gone rogue and the poor — that is, the homeless — have nowhere to go. NBC “Today” Show host Ann Curry just found out that a homeless man had been living in her empty $2.9 million townhouse on New York City’s Upper West side. The man was said to have been there for about a year. Curry and her husband have been renovating the house “for about eight years,” while living in Gramercy Park. It has been a magnet to other homeless persons too.

And why not? City shelters may have no space, and are sometimes dangerous. The homeless are chased out of public spaces like Central Park. Urban poor have been taking over rich people’s abandoned homes for centuries, just like in the novel The Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz; although the story’s set in Egypt it rings a bell here.

The other fish story I’d been thinking of happened late last year. Remember when Bank of America changed the locks and shut off utilities to a house they had nothing to do with? A doctor came home from vacation and found signs all over his house saying Bank of America was foreclosing on it. The doctor had no mortgage with them, no connection whatever. He breaks open his door and the whole place reeks of rotting halibut and salmon he’d stored in his freezer before leaving — 75 pounds of it. If someone had been home, maybe that wouldn’t have… yeah, if a homeless person had been inside, maybe he’d have found the fish and taken them out before they made the place smell so bad. Maybe.

Either way, the Wall Street banks, mortgage industry, and the financial companies who helped create the changed economy we are now enjoying — are clearly responsible for a long, long chain of adverse events.

For once, Wall Street stocks are beaming truth out to the rest of us. The stock market is falling, because it’s perfectly clear that the deal struck betwixt Obama and the two houses of Congress is a lousy one and will do us harm in the near future.

What is “balanced”? That’s how the president described the plan he extended to Boehner. But it was all negatives with no positives. I’d hate to see Obama try to jump-start a car.

And speaking of brinksmanship —

All governing is done on the edge, now.

It would be really nice to have a government that acted responsibly.

I just got another of those political emails that come to you after they find out you have opinions. This one, immediately after the signing of this atrocious debt ceiling fiasco, was asking me to pat Obama on the, uh, hand, I guess; they wanted a donation because he’d helped, supposedly, to force automakers to start making cars that can get 54.5 miles per gallon. (They will start making them, I think, several years from now.) I responded to the automail asking, How about you don’t bother us with this sh__t that should have happened a decade ago? Why didn’t the president invoke the Constitutional option and raise the debt ceiling without awarding the Republicans all these budget cuts that’ll hurt us later?

I shouldn’t write things like that — although I did receive a very polite autoreply thanking me. Because the car thing should have happened two decades ago.